Southern Steel Accelerates Business with JOBSCOPE Steel Fabrication Software
Article written by Southern Steel Fabrication President, Mike Holland.
In 1983, when we purchased Southern Steel Company, the Phelps-Tointon group had replaced the Data Point computer system with a patchwork-quilt of steel fabrication software. Tied together with custom programming, it included a J.D. Edwards ERP financial software, and portions of a MAPICS MRP software order entry and inventory manufacturing software.
Since that time, we have tripled our revenues, increased our steel fabrication output by 400% and evolved to become The Leader in our industry. As we moved into this century (the third millennium), we were still working with this patchwork-quilt of 1970’s vintage steel fabrication software. To maintain our position as The Leader, we had improve the way we did business, our communication abilities, and the way we process our information.
After years of researching steel fabrication manufacturing software, we chose the JOBSCOPE ERP system because it was designed for Steel fabrication order-driven businesses, like ours. We are oriented to the customer order and project. Each lock that we ship is unique, belonging to only one door in one certain facility world-wide. This part of our business could not change. Everything else could change and had to if we wanted to remain competitive.
The JOBSCOPE manufacturing software system, allowed us to reevaluate our entire business. The result of combining our 100 years of knowledge and experience with an advanced information planning system was our competitive advantage.
The success of Jobscope’s steel fabrication software implementation was so important that we identified a core team who organized and lead us through each step. Margaret Schauffele, Roger Knisley and Murray Hall were assigned to this core implementation team. This was their primary assignment for 8 months. In addition, team leaders were selected to represent each department as we implemented their portion of the information system.
Through the growth of our business, we have developed an informal set of procedures for how each of us performs our job. Through the implementation process, we validated these procedures and created new ones. Once finalized, these procedures were formally documented for each area so that we could easily train other team members. Complete and documented operating procedures were a commitment of our core implementation team.
The core team developed goals for the information system implementation. Department goals were developed by each of the team leaders. At the end of this process we measured our progress against these goals and against our current performance.
During the implementation process, many of our employees were asked to step back from their everyday tasks and challenge how they did their work and how their work related to the people ahead them and after them in the process. Some of the questions they asked were:
- How can we eliminate some of the effort that each of us invests in the process so that we can streamline our entire company?
- How can we change the way we do business to eliminate costs, eliminate effort and increase the quality of the product and information that we produce?
- How can we link our company to the future and stay ahead of our competitors?
We have redesigned our business to respond to our customers’ needs, and there is no one in this industry who is better than we are at servicing our customers. JOBSCOPE steel fabrication software is the center of our system and the key to our manufacturing business success.
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